Case Study: Real-time Android Charts for Medical Industry

About a year and a half ago, IMT AG (Information Management Technology) approached us to ask about porting SciChart Realtime Charts on the Android operating system. At the time we only supported Windows Presentation Foundation, but thanks to their encouragement, and their sponsorship by committing to pre-order SciChart Android licenses for their team, we were able to embark on the port, and have now released SciChart’s Android Chart with record real-time performance.

Michael Guntli from IMT AG at Droidcon Berlin

Over the past year or so, IMT have worked alongside us providing valuable feedback as we developed the worlds fastest real-time Android Chart Control, which uses a mixture of Java, C++ with the Android NDK and OpenGL ES2.0 to achieve record performance for an Android Chart. We were able to squeeze the most out of a low powered device by porting our already proven drawing and resampling algorithms from Windows to Android, and implementing them in this new chart control.

Benchmark of the Freescale iMX6 hardware. A fraction of the speed of high-end Android devices.

Michael and his team at IMT have built a prototype device for the medical industry running on a dual-core Freescale iMX-6 hardware which uses SciChart’s Android Chart library for the real-time charting. The Freescale iMX-6 is low power ARM processor (dual core, 800MHz) that has about half the computing power of the lowest of the low cost $50 Android Smart phone, and a fraction of the speed of a high-end Nexus smartphone, yet thanks to the engineering of the IMT team and the performance of SciChart for Android, it still runs data-acquisition, processing, UI updates and of course realtime charts at a smooth 30 FPS.

The presentation content is very valuable from an engineers perspective as it goes into great detail about how to develop a truly real-time medical or industrial software with Android as an embedded operating system while running on low power ARM hardware. Some of the challenges faced by IMT are the same as our own: garbage collection, performance of the Java runtime and Android views have all required some inventive workarounds.

Such an application demonstrates the ability of SciChart’s Android Chart component in Industrial and Medical usage where the Android operating system is used in a low-power embedded system. It also shows the amazing performance of SciChart’s Android Chart! If we can draw smooth charts on hardware that is low power, with a low CPU clock speed, then imagine what it can do on the latest smartphones or tablets!

The full presentation slides are available online, as well as a youtube video of the presentation below. There’s a little bit about SciChart at the end, and we really appreciate Michael taking the time to promote us in this way. We hope their project is a great success and we look forward to continuing to work with IMT in the future.